Re: We need a META schema registry!

At 05:44 AM 3/18/97 -0800, Benjamin Franz wrote:
>The *ONLY* way I can see out of this will be if at least one of the top 5
>or so search engines made a public announcement that they will search rank
>sites using a high level meta-information standard *higher* with that
>infomration than sites not using them. This would align the *market*
>behind it because they *do* understand 'ranked high is GOOD' and will be
>*motivated* to try then. You would then see pressure on the HTML editor
>makers to include whatever standard the search engines were using - which
>would bypass the general user incomprehension problem. 

Yes! Excellent idea!

Watch out for Microsoft, though, who are beginning to use META tags which
correspond to the properties sheets in MSOffice documents, such as Title,
Subject, etc. This is a good thing, IMHO, but they are bound to screw it
up through poor communication. I have a use for these tags (or for some
other scheme for standard META info) but currently the export utils suck.

I fully support a standardized scheme for META info, more due to the
fact that it should be part of the standard export facility from these
Word Processor applications than because I want to confuse Web authors.
And as far as the reason for dropping "distribution" goes, I'm sure if it
had been documented on AltaVista's site it would be in use today. (It
would probably be misunderstood, sure, but it would be used)...

I just got back from a search engine/indexer demo and the SE there said
that his company would be happy to support a standardized scheme for
handling/indexing META data if one existed. I reminded him of the W3C,
but it might be worth making some noise about before we get nine billion
incompatible ways to handle these things...

Steve


--
Steven Champeon                  !        I'll sleep
Web Guru/Intranet Builder        !       when I'm dead.
schampeo@hesketh.com             !         - Zevon

Received on Tuesday, 18 March 1997 09:21:40 UTC